Man fined Dhs5,000 for posting someone else’s picture on Instagram without permission in Dubai

Mohammed Yaseen, Staff Reporter

The Dubai Misdemeanor Court fined a European Dhs5,000 for posting pictures of the director of a company specialised in the yacht industry to promote his establishment without the permission of its owner.

The court also ruled that the pictures and comments be deleted from all social media sites.

The court ordered depriving the suspect of using the Internet for a period of three months, and referring the civil case to the competent civil court without any fees.

The details of the case date back to January 2023, when a company manager submitted a report complaining that his privacy had been violated by a competing company, where he saw his photo on Instagram, on board one of his company’s yachts, and it turned out that the publisher of the photo was a competing company, so he reported the incident to the police.

According to the case file, the account holder who posted the photo was summoned for interrogation and admitted that the photo used in his company's account belonged to him as it was downloaded by an advertising designer in his home country via the Internet search engine.

He added that he used it in a promotional advertisement for his company after he contracted with the designer to design and manage a page of a company he runs in Dubai.